Mel Blanc was the man of 1000 voices.
Mel
Blanc was the voice of Looney Tunes. Mel Blanc was the voice man of the
century.

Did you know he grew up in
Portland? Did you
know he helped Happy Rabbit become Bugs Bunny? Did you know he married
his wife twice but never divorced her? Did you know he got an Oscar for
a Tweety and Sylvester movie? Well that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Tha-tha-tha-tha-that's not all folks.

Mel Blanc was born in
SanFrancisco but
moved to Portland at a very young age. From very young he tried to
imitate the different ethnic voices all around him. His very first
effort was imitating the Japanese grocery clerk around the corner. He
tried accents from as many different countries as he could. From the
start Mel knew he wanted to do voice work.

At Lincoln High School in the
1920s he was the
class clown. He was smart, but not really interested. As a youngster
his name was Blank with a K, not Blanc with a C. But once one of his
teachers told him he was Blank just like his name, so he legally
changed it.

Once when he was skipping class,
he found that
the halls of Lincoln High School had the perfect echo. He started doing
really cackles to see how they echoed. While he was doing this he ran
right into the principal. Later that same cackle would be used for
Woody Woodpecker.

He
skipped school to see vaudeville shows. In a vaudeville show something
like a TV show is performed right on stage. Most of the early radio and
movie stars got their start in Vaudeville including- Mae West, Jack
Benny Burns and Allens and many others. Vaudeville died because of
radio and movies. The very last vaudeville show ever performed was done
on a Friday the 13th in 1932.

He also skipped school to go
swimming with his
friends in the Willamette River. Once he and two friends dared each
other to see who could jump closest to a paddleboat. Well one of his
friends and he came up but the other boy got too close and died. He was
grounded all summer.

Mel Blanc looked like a young
man ready
for failure but this wild and crazy childhood led him right into his
career.

Hollywood in the Depression

Very soon after high school, Mel Blanc
drove down to Hollywood with two vaudeville friends. There he ran into
an old friend and they decided to room together. Both wanted to be in
radio but neither were doing very well. One fine night the two decided
to go to a dance at the beach together. They both checked to see if
they each had 5 cents and hopped in his car. While Mel was cruising
around at the dance, he saw a beautiful blond. He didn't want to cut in
because she looked like she was having a wonderful time with someone
else. This someone else happened to be her brother, who she was trying
to teach to dance. Mel danced with another girl but she saw how obvious
it was that he wanted to dance with her friend so she set them up.

This girl's name was Estelle and
soon they got
into quite a chat. She gave him her number. When he didn't write it
down, she was quite shocked. He later told her, "If it's the right
girl, you remember her number."

They were both Jewish and soon
they fell in
love. They decided to have a secret wedding, but since it wasn't
Jewish, they couldn't tell anyone. Later they decided to have another
wedding, a Jewish one, with the whole family.

Now this was the heart of the
depression and
Mel's career was going nowhere, so when he was offered his own radio
show up in Portland he automatically took it. He just hadn't made it in
Hollywood.

Going "Nuts" in Portland

He was back in Portland with his own radio
show called "Cobwebs & Nuts" on KGW. His wife and he hosted it
live. It was a great show and he got lots of sponsors but he was barely
making a living.

Once Estelle and he drove up to
Vancouver for a
5 cent box of candy corn. When they got there they realized they didn't
even have 5 cents between them. That quite disheartened them. Even when
he had eleven sponsors, his weekly salary was only $5. That was not
enough to keep them going.

One of his friends, knowing that
Mel &
Estelle were barely making it, offered Mel the chance to sell insurance
door to door for $50 a week. Mel really considered it; after all KGW
was only giving him $5 a week. He asked Estelle if he should sell
insurance, but she told him he would never be happy doing that and told
him not to. She knew him well. Right there she looked him in the eye
and told him if they were going to be broke, let them be broke
somewhere sunny. They moved back to Hollywood.

Mel in the Looney Bin

It took quite a few years to get
anywhere in
Hollywood, but he did find work with Disney for a short period of time.
He did the entire voice of the cat in the movie Pinocchio. Right before
the movie came out, Disney cut all his work, leaving only a hiccup.
Though he was paid $800, his voice was not in the movie at all. While
he wanted to work for Disney because they were the best, he wanted to
work for Warner Brothers because they were the worst.

At the time, Looney Tunes and Merrie
Melodies
had none of the characters it has today, except Porky Pig. Mel tried
for one year to get a tryout for Warner Brothers before he got the
chance. When he did he was immediatly a favorite. His very first voice
for Looney Tunes was the "Drunken Bull," a Porky Pig character. Very
soon after that, he replaced the man doing the voice of Porky Pig who
stuttered in real life. When Porky Pig became suddenly popular, he
needed a rival. So they created Daffy Duck who quickly became so much
more popular than Porky that he to needed his own apponent.

They then created Happy Rabbit
who was very
dorky. Too dorky. Mel thought that Happy Rabbit needed a new name. He
suggested they name him after his animator Ben Hardaway, or Bugs. "Bugs
Rabbit" they exclaimed, "that's even worst that Happy Rabbit." "Not
Bugs Rabbit, Bugs Bunny" Mel said, and so it was. Now with the new
name, Mel also had to give him a new voice. Automatically a Brooklyn
accent came into mind. And so Bugs Bunny as we know and love was
created.

Bugs Bunny's famous line-"What's up
Doc?," was
not complete without the sound of him nibbling on a carrot. Well this
became a problem, because Mel wasn't a carrot fan, at least not raw. He
found it nearly impossible to chew the carrot, swallow it, and then say
his next line. Therefore he would chew on the carrot, they would stop
recording, he would spit it out and they would start again. Many
mothers of that time, to convince their kids to eat carrots, would say
"Bugs Bunny does." If only they had known.

Soon it became obvious that
neither Daffy Duck
nor Porky Pig was any match for Bugs Bunny, so they created Elmer Fudd.
Elmer Fudd was originally played by Arthur Q. Bryan, but when he died
Mel added the role to his growing repetoire.

Even Elmer Fudd was not clever
enough to
surpass Bugs, so they created Yosemite Sam, just the right character
for Bugs.

Those Terrible Twosomes

In all this time Mel's characters had not
had love affairs, and one of the directors read his mind. He created
Pepe Le Pew, who came as a twosome with a cat that he loved. they
joined lots of other couples such as Tweety and Sylvester, Foghorn
Leghorn and Henery Hawk, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, and many more.
These twosomes were Mel's favorites.

Looney Tunes had been getting
Oscars for their
cartoons, (five in total) and the producer of Warner Brothers had them
all. This man, Eddie Selzer became incredibly ill and told Mel that he
could have any Oscar he wanted. Mel's favorite Looney Tunes cartoon had
been an Oscar winning Tweety and Sylvester cartoon called "Birds
Anonymous." Mel asked for that one, but the man recovered. Mel didn't
receive the Oscar until the man did finally die. His wife gave Mel the
Oscar. Eddie Selzer had remembered his promise.

The Accident

Mel himself almost died at age 52. He was
driving along Sunset Boulevard when someone swerved around a corner
right into him. Though the other driver was barely harmed, nearly every
bone in Mel's body was broken; and he was in a full body cast. In a
coma for three weeks and the newspapers declared Mel dead.

Rusty Nails and Mel Blanc

His family and friends had all come
trying to
arouse him with no luck. One day a young doctor had a bright idea. He
said, "How are you feeling today Bugs Bunny?" Mel's response was faint
but unmistakably Bugs, "Eh just fine Doc, how are you?" Then he
inquired "and Porky Pig, how are you feeling?" "J-uh-j--uh-just f-fine
th-th-thanks," he replied. Mel slowly came back to life through his
voices. I find this remarkable.

Those Looney Tune years were
some of Mel's
happiest, but that's not where his life ends. All through those Looney
Tune years Mel was also on the best radio shows of the time. They
include, The Jack Benny Show, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show,
The Abbot and Costello Show and many many others. He even had his own
show on NBC for a while, but I'm not going to get into all of that.

I think Mel Blanc was an amazing
man, but I'm
far from the only one. Labeled the man of 1000 voices, some people
claim that the cartoon medium was made for him. Whenever Kids (or
adults for that matter,) see Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, or
the Tazmanian Devil strut their stuff, they're honoring the legend and
voice of Mel Blanc.
Tha-tha-tha-tha-that's all Folks.